Legal
Terms of Use
The short version, which does apply: Backd is pre-release software provided for testing, free of charge, with no warranty and no guarantee of availability. Test data may be deleted as part of development. It is a fitness and performance tool, not a medical device, and nothing it says is medical advice. How we handle your data is already settled — see the privacy policy.
1. Who we are, and what these cover
Backd is operated by Surgent Tech Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales, company number 15843941, registered office 17 Fleming Court, Shevington, Wigan, WN6 8GG.
These terms govern your use of the Backd app and the surgenttech.co.uk website. By creating an account or using the app you accept them. If you do not accept them, do not use Backd.
They sit alongside our privacy policy, which explains what we do with your data and forms part of your agreement with us.
2. Backd is pre-release
Backd is not generally available. It is being tested by a small group of people we invite directly. That has consequences you should take seriously rather than as boilerplate:
- Features may change, break, or be withdrawn without notice.
- Your data may be deleted as part of development. Do not treat Backd as the only record of your training.
- There is no service level, no uptime commitment and no support commitment. We will do our best; we are not promising a response time.
- We may end the testing programme, or your access to it, at any time.
3. Who may use it
You must be 18 or over. Backd is not designed or intended for children, and the fuelling engine refuses to produce guidance for anyone under 18. If we learn that an account belongs to someone under 18 we will close it.
You need an invitation and an account. Keep your password to yourself — you are responsible for what happens under your account, and you must tell us promptly at info@surgenttech.co.uk if you think someone else has access to it.
4. Health and safety — read this one
Backd is a fitness and performance tool. It is not a medical device. It does not diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any condition, and nothing it tells you is medical advice.
Its pacing and fuelling guidance is general, is built on a framework provided by a qualified sports nutritionist, and is produced automatically from the information you give it and the signals your phone can measure. It cannot see you. It does not know how you feel.
- Every decision during a session is yours. A cue is a suggestion, not an instruction, and you should ignore it whenever your own judgement says otherwise.
- If you feel unwell, stop. Chest pain, dizziness, faintness, severe gut symptoms or anything that frightens you means stop exercising and seek medical help.
- Speak to a doctor or a registered dietitian before you start, and before changing a fuelling strategy, if you have any medical condition, are pregnant, are taking medication, or have any doubt about whether exercise is safe for you.
- Backd deliberately refuses to give nutrition guidance in some circumstances and tells you to speak to a clinician instead. That refusal is a feature. Do not work around it.
Exercise carries inherent risk. You take part at your own risk, and you are responsible for exercising within your own limits.
5. What you may not do
- Use Backd unlawfully, or to harass, abuse, threaten or impersonate anyone.
- Send a supporter message you would not want read aloud to the person running.
- Try to break, probe or circumvent our security, rate limits or access controls, or access another person’s data.
- Scrape, resell, or build a competing product out of our output.
- Upload anything containing malware, or anything you do not have the right to upload.
We may suspend or close an account that does any of this, without notice where the problem is serious.
6. Messages and other content
You keep ownership of what you put into Backd — your notes, your voice recordings, your session data. You give us permission to store and process it for the purpose of running the service for you. That permission ends when the content does.
There is exactly one other purpose, and it is never covered by the permission above: we may only use your sessions to train models that improve the coaching for other people if you separately opt in to that. It is off unless you turn it on, you can withdraw it at any time, and withdrawing it costs you nothing else. What it covers, what it excludes and how long we keep the data under it are set out in our privacy policy. If we ever want your data for a purpose that is neither of these, we have to come and ask.
If you share a supporter link, other people can send you messages. Those messages are theirs, not ours, and we do not endorse them. We run an automatic tone check on messages we can read, to reduce unkind ones. It does not catch everything, and it does not run on everything. We transcribe voice messages ourselves so they can be checked too, but a recording we cannot make out is not checked, and if either service is unavailable the message still reaches you unchecked. Treat it as a filter, not a guarantee.
What you can rely on is the control you have: you can stop accepting messages at any time, block a sender, limit how many you receive, and delete anything sent to you.
We may remove content that breaks these terms or the law.
7. Plans, prices and payment
Backd is free during pre-release, and we are not currently able to charge you for anything. There is no payment processing in the product.
Where the app shows plan names and prices, those figures are indicative placeholders. Choosing one records your interest so we know what to build. It is not a purchase, it does not create a contract to pay, and no money will ever be taken on the strength of it.
If we introduce paid plans we will tell you first, and you will have to agree separately before anything is charged.
8. Connecting other services
You can connect Strava and Garmin, and you may install Backd through Apple or Google. Those services have their own terms and privacy policies, and your relationship with them is yours, not ours. We are not responsible for them, for their availability, or for what they do with your data under their own terms.
You can disconnect a service at any time, which revokes our access to it.
Where you connect an activity service, we import the completed activities you authorise and nothing else. We do not take all-day health data such as sleep, stress or heart-rate variability, and we do not receive live data from your device while you are moving.
9. Our rights in Backd
Backd, its name, its branding, its software and the output of its coaching engine belong to us or our licensors. We give you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable right to use the app for your own training. Nothing else is granted.
10. Feedback
If you send us a suggestion, we may use it without owing you anything for it. We will not identify you as its source without asking.
11. Ending it
You can stop using Backd whenever you like, and ask us to delete your account by emailing info@surgenttech.co.uk. We may suspend or end your access if you break these terms, if we have to for legal or security reasons, or if we stop running the testing programme.
12. We cannot promise it will work
Backd is provided “as is”. Beyond what the law requires of us, we do not promise that it will be available, accurate, uninterrupted, free of errors, or fit for any particular purpose — and in a pre-release product you should expect all four to fail at some point.
In particular, GPS is imprecise, a phone can lose signal, audio can fail to play, and a connected sensor can disconnect. Backd tells you when it does not trust its own input; it cannot always know.
13. Liability
Nothing in these terms limits or excludes our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited or excluded.
Subject to that, and to the extent the law allows: we are not liable for loss of profit, loss of data, loss of a training or race outcome, or any indirect or consequential loss; and our total liability to you for everything else connected with Backd is limited to £100, which reflects that we provide it free of charge.
We are not liable for failures caused by events outside our reasonable control, or by a third-party service we depend on.
14. Your rights as a consumer
If you are using Backd as a consumer, you have legal rights that these terms do not affect. Nothing here takes away a right you have under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 or any other consumer protection law, and where anything in these terms conflicts with such a right, that right wins.
15. Changes
We may change these terms. If a change matters to you we will tell you by email or in the app before it takes effect, and the date at the top will change. Continuing to use Backd after that means you accept the new version; if you do not, stop using it and ask us to close your account.
16. Law and courts
These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction. If you live elsewhere in the UK you may also bring proceedings in your own courts.
17. Contact
info@surgenttech.co.uk, or Surgent Tech Ltd, 17 Fleming Court, Shevington, Wigan, WN6 8GG.